# Should AI agents be treated as privileged automated users?

Yes, and usually with tighter controls than a human with the same rights. An agent acts at machine speed, does not get tired or suspicious, can be steered by text it reads, and often runs with a token that never expires. So give each agent its own identity rather than a person's account, grant only the permissions the task needs, prefer read-only access, separate environments so a test agent cannot touch production, require human approval for payments, deletions, external messages and permission changes, set expiry and rotation on its credentials, and log every action it takes in a place it cannot alter. Review agents in the same access reviews as service accounts and include them in offboarding. The cost of skipping this is concrete: IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 found that 13% of organisations reported breaches of AI models or applications, and 97% of those reported lacking proper AI access controls. On the network side, NetSenX detects on every plan the behaviour that a misused identity shows, such as lateral movement and unusual uploads, from whichever host the agent runs on.

FAQ: [AI use and AI security](https://netsenx.com/en/faq/ai) · https://netsenx.com/en/faq/should-ai-agents-be-treated-as-privileged-users

## Read next

- https://netsenx.com/en/shadow-ai-detection
- https://netsenx.com/en/ai-transparency

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